• January 13, 2025
• Collections

This Just In: Chopstick Sleeves as Emissaries of Japanese Typography and Culture

Designer and educator Angie Wang deciphers a collection of over 500 sleeves recently donated to the Archive.

Paper chopstick sleeves emerged at the turn of the 20th century when disposable chopsticks and packaged meals gained popularity with the advent of train travel. In addition to ensuring cleanliness, printed paper chopstick sleeves became vernacular advertisements for shops and restaurants. 

The latest addition to the Archive’s holdings of Asian ephemera is the hashibukuro collection of Mr. Susumu Kitagawa of Fuji City, Japan. While individually modest in their design and messaging, when considered as a whole the sleeves that comprise this collection map a singular history of Japanese ideology and aesthetics.

National Identity: Origami and Mount Fuji

There is perhaps nothing more emblematic of Japan than Mount Fuji. The highest peak in the country, Fujisan has been venerated in Japanese art and literature for a millennium. Frequent eruptions in the 8th and 9th century prompted the Japanese to deify the volcano as Asama no Okami, a great mountain god capable of breathing fire. It is considered sacred in both Shinto and Japanese Buddhist traditions, and the Japanese have made pilgrimages up the mountain for centuries. 

A more modest but equally popular expression of Japanese culture is origami (“folding paper”). Its origin is ceremonial: during the 7th century folded paper was used in Shinto rituals and to decorate shrines. Recreational origami emerged in the 1600s as paper became more affordable and was no longer reserved for specialized purposes. 

A chopstick sleeve for a restaurant in Fujinomiya, a city built on the slopes of the iconic mountain, features a pattern of miniature Mount Fujis. Origami folding instructions on the back illustrate how the sleeve can be transformed into a chopstick rest (hashioki) in the likeness of the beloved, snow-capped Fujisan.

Speeding Toward Modernity

Three crabs beckon a passing train with placards and a Japanese flag on the front of this charming sleeve. Their signs bear the characters 米吾 (“Komego”), the name of an ekiben vendor located near the railway station in the coastal city of Yonago.

Ekiben are particular kinds of boxed meals available at train stations and along platforms where they are sometimes sold to passengers through open windows. A portmanteau of eki (“railway station”) and bento (“boxed meal”), ekiben first appeared during the Meiji period (1868–1912.¹ when train travel became possible — and with it, the demand for portable meals.

Over time many train stations became famous for ekiben that reflected the local cuisine. (Komego is known for its gozaemonzushi, a mackerel sushi inspired by the lunches local boatmen ate as they sailed the rough waters of the Sea of Japan.) The chopstick sleeve for ekiben shop Sapporo Station Standing Sales Company (札幌駅立売商会) features an illustration of a steam engine stretching along the length of the sleeve, giving no indication that its speciality is yanagimochi, a soft rice cake made from Hokkaido’s glutinous rice and wrapped in sweet red bean paste. The shop opened in 1899 and its website still showcases a photo of a steam locomotive in front of the original Sapporo station — a curious structure built in what is known as the Japanese-Western Eclectic Architecture style.

The impulse to fuse Japanese and Western elements came to signal modernization. The sleeve for Numazuken (沼津軒) — a department store located opposite the Numazuken train station — advertises a restaurant that serves Western, Chinese, and Japanese cuisine. Its “mascot knight” is modeled after the Jack of Spades; the fanciful vehicle behind him seems equal parts palanquin and horse-drawn carriage. The letterforms are a cross-pollination of East and West: the strokes comprising the capital “R” mimic the brushwork of Asian calligraphy; the bold kanji characters with their upright rigidity, sharp angles, and blunt terminals evoke the heavy, geometric sans-serif fonts of the West.

Breaking Bread: “Sumo Stew” and Kettle Rice

In Western culture, the act of breaking bread is a traditional symbol of fostering community. (The word companion is formed from the Latin com- “with” and panis “bread” — literally one with whom you share your bread.²) In Japan, where bread has historically held less cultural significance, community is instead created through the sharing of rice and noodles.

Chankonabe, also known as “sumo stew,” is a type of one-pot dish eaten in sumo stables where wrestlers live and train. This robust stew is replete with vegetables and proteins such as tofu, fish, and chicken cooked in broth. (Meat from four-legged animals was historically avoided since to “touch the ground on all fours” was to lose the match.) The word chanko is likely a compound of chan (“parent”) and ko (“child”), alluding to the ritual of coaches and trainees gathering to share a meal from the same pot.

The chopstick sleeve for Chanko Edozawa (ちゃんこ江戶沢) — located in the Ryōgoku neighborhood of Tokyo — the center of the sumo wrestling world — simply reads “Edozawa” in a calligraphic script. A brushwork caricature of a sumo wrestler with one leg raised high in the shiko position is the only hint that Edozawa is a chanko restaurant.

The chopstick sleeve for Masuten announces its specialties: tempura and kamameshi. Kamameshi, or “kettle rice,” is a Japanese rice dish traditionally cooked in — and eaten out of — an iron pot. It is said to have originated in 1923 in the immediate aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake: the shopkeeper of Kamameshi Haru in Asakusa took inspiration from the distributed rice that was cooked and eaten communally and began selling “kettle rice.” Today most pots are sized for an individual serving, but the rice is still eaten directly from the pot and is meant to be shared.

Onnade (女手): Women’s Script

The frost on
the branches of the plum tree
melts away;
The dew that has not yet dried
spills onto the blossoms.

—Minamoto no Sanetomo

When the Japanese established their writing system around 1600 years ago they adopted Chinese characters — kanji, literally Han characters — for both meaning and sound. Kanji was used in official correspondence and recordkeeping, and its use was largely reserved for men from the ruling class. 

Chinese characters are logograms — each sign represents a complete word — and did not prove to be an efficient system for expressing a syllabic language like Japanese. (It is time-consuming to write every syllable in kanji which tends to have many strokes.) Kanji was gradually simplified into a cursive script, and by the Heian period (794–1185) had evolved into an independent phonetic syllabary called kana.

While many noblewomen knew how to read kanji, they were not allowed to engage in official duties or to freely use kanji for personal pursuits. Women quickly adopted the simpler and less formal script, using kana to express themselves in diaries and letters and, for the first time, publish literary works. Kana thus gave Japanese women a written voice and came to be known as onnade (女手), or “women's writing.”

Hana ni koboruru (花にこぼるる), a brand of sake, is written in a whimsical script on a chopstick sleeve for a Japanese inn. The calligraphy is the work of Machi Shunsō, a renowned female calligrapher who studied kana calligraphy of the Heian period. The stroke weight is delicate — kana is typically written with a small brush — and the characters are organically spaced as they flow down the sleeve.

Hana ni koboruru (“spilling onto flowers”) is the last line of a poem written by Minamoto no Sanetomo, the third Shogun of the Kamakura Shogunate. In this poem Sanetomo observes how frost that has formed on plum trees melts and falls onto the blossoms — a poignant analogy for the the passage of time. (And perhaps also, from the brewer’s perspective, for the pouring of sake.)

Flower Storms: Finding Beauty in the Ephemeral

Machi Shunsō also created the calligraphic wordmark for Hanafubuki (花吹雪), the inn that produces Hana ni koboruru rice wine. The name Hanafubuki (literally, “flower storm”) alludes to the spectacle of windswept petals scattering like snowflakes — a symbol of life’s evanescence. 

The very things that remind us of life’s transience can also heighten our awareness of its beauty. (This idea is encapsulated by the Japanese idiom mono no aware, or “a sensitivity to the ephemeral.”) Perhaps this is one of the reasons we save ephemera: to revel in the beauty of the fleeting, even as we seek to preserve it.

Despite the fact that single-use chopsticks are temporal by design, Mr. Kitagawa nonetheless succeeded in amassing over 800 chopstick sleeves from the 1970s through the 2000s. (The bulk of his collection is now housed at the Archive thanks to his granddaughter Taiyo’s donation.) What were once disposable have become unintentional repositories of information; of entwined histories of people, places, and Japanese culture.

Personal collections of ephemera such as this make Letterform Archive a singular resource: rare books and type specimens live in the stacks alongside punk flyers and chopstick sleeves. Few arts and cultural institutions treat both valuable and everyday objects with equal reverence. At the Archive, ephemera are no longer quite so ephemeral.

A Selection of Sleeves from the Kitagawa Collection

All images in the gallery below are hi-fi captures. Click an image to enter fullscreen view, then click or pinch to enlarge.

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A Note about the Collector:  Susumu Kitagawa (1923–2019)

Susumu Kitagawa was born in Fuji, a city overlooking Suruga Bay and famous for its views of Mount Fuji. Mr. Kitagawa graduated from high school during World War II and was immediately deployed to China. He survived the war — and imprisonment in a Siberian labor camp—and returned home to work for Fujikyu, a private railway company that operated the train line closest to Mount Fuji.

Mr. Kitagawa traveled across Japan in his work for the Fujikyu tourism division. He fastidiously documented his trips with both written diaries and photographs that he carefully dated, captioned, and assembled into albums. (He would eventually compile over 175 photo albums, all prominently on display in his living room.) An archivist at heart, Mr. Kitagawa also collected sake cups and chopstick sleeves during his travels.

When asked what his collection — or the process of collecting — might have meant to her grandfather, Taiyo Kitagawa speculated that her grandfather’s habit of documenting and collecting may have been related to his experiences in the war. “He rarely talked about it, but I know it left an imprint on him,” she wrote. “He was trained to run into vehicles with explosives strapped onto his body but fortunately missed a battle by days. He was then captured and became a prisoner of war.”

A desire to extend the life of objects may also have compelled Mr. Kitagawa. Mottainai is a Japanese adage expressing regret that “something is being discarded needlessly”³ — a familiar impulse for the generation of Japanese who lived through the deprivations of war. Taiyo recalls, “We probably used the same Christmas wrapping paper and ribbons for at least a decade. My grandfather would lecture me if I left even one single grain of rice in my bowl — every grain takes a year to grow and one must not waste it.”

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kate Long Stellar for the opportunity to translate and catalog this collection; Stephen Coles for encouraging me to share my research; Takako Takigawa for our many delightful exchanges about calligraphy; Nami Kurita for supplying pivotal translation and detective work; and Taiyo Kitagawa for entrusting the Archive with her grandfather’s beloved collection of chopstick sleeves.

 — Angie Wang is a principal of Design is Play, the San Francisco design studio she shares with Mark Fox. Angie and Mark are co-authors of Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing, published by The Monacelli Press in 2016. She is also a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts (CCA) where she has taught courses in typography since 2005. Angie holds a BA in East Asian Languages from UC Berkeley as well as a BFA in Graphic Design from CCAC.

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Credits

• “Reading the Plum Blossoms” from Kinkai Wakashū Volume 1, Spring. Written by Minamoto no Sanetomo; translation by Angie Wang.

Bibliography

• “About Kana Calligraphy [かな書道とは].” Shodonyūmon (書道入門). Accessed 15 November 2024.
• Chōgetsu (澄月). “Kanji (Men’s Script) and Kana (Women’s Script) [男文字 (男手) と 女文字 (女手)].” Shoyuan (書遊庵), 25 August 2017.
• Fox, Mark and Wang, Angie. Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing. The Monacelli Press, 2016.
• Frédéric, Louis. Japan Encyclopedia (Harvard University Press Reference Library). Belknap Press, 2002.
• Kawai, Atsushi. “Express Train to Industrialization: Japan’s First Railway Line.” Nippon.com, 13 October 2022.
• “Kinkai Wakashū 22.” Wakapoetry.net, 3 November 2023.
• “Kinkai Wakashū Volume 1, Spring [金槐和歌集/卷之上/春部].”  Wikisource,. Accessed 23 October 2024.
• Strusiewicz, Cezary Jan. “A History of Japanese Train Evolution.” Tokyo Weekender, 15 November 2023.
• “VOX POPULI: Mutability and invariability lie in 150 years of Japan’s railways.” Asahi Shimbun, 29 July 2022.

Footnotes

1. In 1853, Japan ended its 250 years of isolation, ushering in a period of rapid Westernization and modernization known as the Meiji period. ↩︎
2. Mark Fox and Angie Wang, Symbols: A Handbook for Seeing (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2016), page 203. ↩︎
3. Hasegawa, Kōhei (1983). “Mottai-nashi Kō”. Academic Bulletin of Nagano University. 4 (3–4): 25–30. ↩︎